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Re: RELAX NG pluggable type libraries

• To: Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>
• Subject: Re: RELAX NG pluggable type libraries
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:48:22 -0400
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <656060884.20041026101332@j...>
• References: <417D8B45.8000009@m...> <656060884.20041026101332@j...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Jeni Tennison wrote:

> The Datatype Library Language (DTLL) that I've been working on should
> eventually provide a declarative method for defining datatypes for
> RELAX NG (etc.), but it's at a fairly early stage, and there aren't
> any implementations yet.

Interesting. Potentially important. One small concern that tickled the 
back of my head when I read this, though: the target audience. You 
write, "Most RELAX NG validators provide built-in support for the XML 
Schema datatype library. Many also support an interface that allows you 
to plug in datatype modules, written in the programming language of your 
choice, to define extra datatypes. But the fact that these datatype 
libraries have to be programmed means that ordinary users find them hard 
to construct."

I can't see "ordinary users" defining their own data types, writing XML 
by hand to do this, or learning regular expressions as the proposal 
seems to require. I do think this could be a *very* useful tool for 
programmers who find it easier to use this language rather than writing 
their own Java/C# code. Small languages are good. But I would design it 
with the idea that the people likely to be using it are developers 
rather than ordinary users and target it at their skills and 
expectations. I'd rather have a tool powerful to help developers rather 
than one that's simple enough for end users, if a choice needs to be 
made between the two.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

• References:
  • RELAX NG pluggable type libraries
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: RELAX NG pluggable type libraries
    • From: Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>

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